IBM Brings Watson to Africa as $100M “Project Lucy” Initiative Heralds New Era of Data-Driven Development
IBM has launched a 10-year initiative to
bring Watson and other cognitive systems to Africa in a bid to fuel development
and spur business opportunities across the world’s fastest growing continent.
Dubbed “Project Lucy” after the earliest known human ancestor, IBM will invest US$100
million in the initiative, giving scientists and partners access to the world’s
most advanced cognitive computing technologies.
“In
the last decade, Africa has been a tremendous growth story -- yet the
continent's challenges, stemming from population growth, water scarcity,
disease, low agricultural yield and other factors are impediments to inclusive
economic growth,” said Kamal Bhattacharya, Director, IBM Research – Africa.
“With the ability to learn from emerging patterns and discover new
correlations, Watson's cognitive capabilities hold enormous potential in Africa – helping it to achieve in the next two decades
what today's developed markets have achieved over two centuries.”
IBM's Watson
represents a new era of cognitive computing, in which systems and software are
not programmed, but actually improve by learning so they can discover answers to
questions and uncover insights by analyzing massive amounts of Big Data.
Watson
technologies will be deployed from IBM's new Africa Research laboratory
providing researchers with a powerful set of resources to help develop
commercially-viable solutions in key areas such as healthcare, education, water
and sanitation, human mobility and agriculture.
To
help fuel the cognitive computing market and build an ecosystem around Watson,
IBM will also establish a new pan-African Center
of Excellence for Data-Driven
Development (CEDD) and is recruiting research partners such as universities,
development agencies, start-ups and clients in Africa
and around the world. By joining the initiative, IBM’s partners will be able to
tap into cloud-delivered cognitive intelligence that will be invaluable for
solving the continent’s most pressing challenges and creating new business
opportunities.
“For
Africa to join, and eventually leapfrog, other economies, we need comprehensive
investments in science and technology that are well integrated with economic
planning and aligned to the African landscape,” said Prof Rahamon Bello, Vice
Chancellor, University
of Lagos.
“I see a great opportunity for innovative research partnerships between
companies like IBM and African organizations, bringing together the world’s
most advanced technologies with local expertise and knowledge.”
Center of Excellence for Data-Driven Development
Decades
of development work in Africa have
significantly helped to improve the livelihood and raise the standard of living
of millions across the continent. However, traditional approaches have often
fallen short because of commercial unviability, a domain specific scope and a lack
of accurate data.
Big Data technologies have a major role to play in Africa’s development
challenges: from understanding food price patterns, to estimating GDP and
poverty numbers, to anticipating disease – the key is turning data into
knowledge and actionable insight.
“The
next wave of development in Africa requires a new collaborative approach where
nonprofit and commercial organizations like RTI and IBM work together to
consolidate, analyze and act upon the continent’s data,” said Aaron Williams,
Executive Vice President for International Development, RTI International.
“Data-driven development has the potential to improve the human condition and
provide decision makers with the insight they need to make more targeted
interventions.”
By
establishing the pan-African Center for Data-Driven Development, IBM will
leverage the latest Watson cognitive technologies to provide its research
partners with access to high-frequency and better organized data. This will
enable scientists and analysts to more accurately calculate social and economic
conditions and identify previously unseen correlations across multiple domains.
Through the Project Lucy initiative, partners will be able to tap into IBM’s
unparalleled expertise in cognitive computing across its 12 global laboratories
and new Watson business unit and gain access to the resources, tools and
knowledge-based services necessary for developing cognitive computing
innovations.
“Africa is facing a double challenge: the lack of
accessible data to support its economic development, and the lack of advanced
skills in data analysis. IBM's work to share Watson with Africa will help to
address both challenges," said Michel Bézy, Associate Director, Carnegie Mellon
University in Rwanda.
"We are really excited by this opportunity for our students and faculty to
partner with IBM to solve critical regional problems with the most advanced
cognitive technology available.”
Two
of the first focus areas of the new center are healthcare and education:
Healthcare
Sub-Saharan
Africa is home to approximately 25 percent of
the world’s disease burden, yet the most common form of healthcare outside of
cities is delivered by community health workers. CEDD will collect encyclopedic
knowledge about traditional and non-traditional diseases in Africa.
With access to Watson’s cognitive intelligence, doctors, nurses and field workers
will get help in diagnosing illnesses and identifying the best treatment for
each patient.
For
example, women in sub-Saharan Africa account for 22 percent of
all cases of cervical cancer worldwide mainly due to a lack of services and
knowledge. Watson could provide new insights into the
evolution of cervical cancer in Africa and
suggest new approaches for its prevention, diagnosis and treatment. By feeding
back valuable clinical data about their field observations, healthcare works
will be able to contribute to improving Watson’s inference abilities.
Education
Currently,
half of African children will reach their adolescent years unable to read,
write or perform basic numeric tasks. The key to improving these statistics is
a thorough understanding of student performance, teacher expertise, attendance
levels, class sizes, linguistic abilities and learning materials. While previous
information systems have only provided a limited view of point problems, using
Watson technologies, CEDD aims to create new holistic approaches for analyzing
data to identify previously unrecorded correlations. For example, Watson could
identify the link between a contaminated water borehole, an epidemic of cholera
and the subsequent low levels of school attendance in the region. Watson could
also help to uncover other causes of low school attendance in a particular
region such as a lack of sanitary supplies and cultural traditions placing
childcare responsibility on older siblings.
Today’s
announcement is part of a broader effort by IBM to advance and share cognitive
computing innovations around the world.
Nearly three years after its triumph on the television quiz show
Jeopardy!, IBM has advanced Watson from a game playing innovation into a
commercial technology. The company recently established a new Watson business
unit dedicated to the development and commercialization of cognitive computing
innovations and is investing more than $1 billion to bring cognitive
applications and services to market.
This week IBM is also announcing other investments into the African innovation ecosystem with the opening
of new IBM Innovation Centers in Lagos, Nigeria; Casablanca,
Morocco and Johannesburg, South Africa. These new
centers aim to spur local growth and fuel an ecosystem of development and
entrepreneurship around Big Data and analytics and cloud computing in the
region. In recognition of its role in
driving data-driven growth and opportunity across Africa, this week Frost &
Sullivan named IBM an Innovation Leader in Big Data and Analytics in
Sub-Saharan Africa.
IBM
recently organized an initiative asking people from across Africa to submit
images which best illustrate Africa’s grand challenges and opportunities and
help to illustrate the mission of IBM’s new Africa Research Lab. ‘The World is
Our Lab – Africa’ project has generated over 1200 images from across 25 African
countries helping to tell the other side of the continent’s story. To visit the
project website, go to: http://www.
To
view a selection of these images, visit:
http://bit.ly/1hJD9QO
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